Surface defect detection on industrial drum rollers: Using enhanced YOLOv8n and structured light for accurate inspection

Drum roller surface defect detection is of great research significance for control production quality. Aiming at solving the problems that the traditional light source visual imaging system, which does not clearly reflect defect features, the defect detection efficiency is low, and the accuracy is not enough, this paper designs an image acquisition system based on line fringe structured light and proposes an improved deep learning network model based on YOLOv8n to achieve efficient detection of defects on the rolling surface of a drum roller. In the aspect of image acquisition, this paper selected the line fringe structured light as the system light source, which made up for the problem that the traditional light source does not reflect the defect characteristics. In terms of algorithms, firstly, using deformable convolution instead of standard convolution to enhance the feature extraction ability of the backbone network. Then, a new feature fusion module was proposed to enable the fusion network to learn additional original information. Finally, Wise-IoU was applied to replace CIoU in the loss function, so that the network pays more attention to the high-quality samples. The experimental results show that the improved YOLOv8n algorithm has a certain improvement in detection accuracy. The main average accuracy (mAP) is 97.2%, and the detection time is 4.3ms. The system and algorithm designed in this paper can better ensure the production quality of drum rollers. While effective, the model’s standard rectangular bounding boxes may limit precision for elongated defects. Future work could explore rotated bounding boxes and broader dataset diversity to enhance generalization in real-world applications.